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Comment Re:Why not limit them to one per customer? (Score 1) 131

If you are selling a dev version, then you are retailing a product to the public. Again, if there is more demand at a higher price than you are supplying either quantity/price, the error is the vendor's, not the "scalper's".

That would be fine if Occulus was simply trying to profit maximise here, but that is not even remotely Occulus' intention here. They have a limited supply but want to keep the price low to stimulate development. If they raise the price it goes out of the hands of developers into the hands of rich folks as a space age toy, which is harmful to their business which will rely on having a strong release catalogue at launch.

Back when I used to play Eve Online , debates within the team (A rather large 5000 member alliance, back before the era of 30,000 member coalitions) would occur about whether to ban reselling of our producers to keep the price of combat craft cheap for combat pilots who tended to be poorer than the manufacturers/miners. Ultimately the wealthier producers won out (who where usually happy to have 're-listers' on the market as they could just sell batches of ships to them bulk) but it came at the cost of a lot of combat pilots simply not being able to afford the battleships which in our space had become more expensive than what our enemies where paying. And when the enemy finally came to our gates, we got steamrolled. We never made that mistake again.

Comment Re:Well, duh... (Score 3, Informative) 210

It all strikes down to why law can be so complicated. When done right, laws are subtle things.

Ideally we'd like a "right to be forgotten" that means when I ask Facebook to delete my account, then by delete I mean "not a single bit of my accounts data remains". What we DONT want however is if I go raping or beating people I can get news articles about me supressed. Distilling those distinctions into laws however can end up quite tricky because of all the edge cases.

That requires legal expertise, and unfortunatlely whatever law results is going to be complicated and full of edge cases.

Which, of course means nobody is going to understand the bloody thing.

Comment Re:That proves it (Score 1) 567

Not sure which you are talking about. The ones denying the scam or the ones denying the truth.

The crazy god damn loons who think there is a vast left wing conspiracy of hundreds of thousands of scientists lying about physics FOR SOME REASON.

I'm sorry, but in 2014 there is no functional difference between being a creationist and a global warming denier. It just requires too much belief in weird lizardoid conspiracy theories involving a conspiracy to lie about science going back to the 1870s for reason nobody can seem to explain.

Personally I'd go for Occams law and suggest the reason 97% of atmospheric physicists say AGM is beyond all reasonable doubt is because thats what the god damn evidence says, and its said that since scientists started talking about the spectral banding in CO2 over 100 god damn years ago.

Comment Re:That proves it (Score 1) 567

Not one iota of fact presented. Just a stream of attacks. Pathetic.

Listen cletus, I dont know how its done in alibama, but over here in the north we have this thing called "science" and its done by men called "scientists", not bloggers, preachers, marketing people, or conservative politicians. Now in science we do this thing called "literature review" and it turns out I don't need to present evidence, because other folks have done it for me. Simply go to google, type in IPCC , go to their website and download the reports and theres all the evidence, from tens of thousands of physicts you'll ever need.

And if that doesn't satisfy you, sorry dude, but your too far gone to be helped, and perhaps a better google search is "banjo tabelature"

Comment Re:That proves it (Score 2) 567

Evidently climate scientists can ignore the data and falsify what they need to buttress the alarm.

The ends justify the means. The tired 97% of climate scientists agree...has been thoroughly debunked. People are seeing this for the scam that it really is.

WHEN WILL THE SHEEPLE FINALLY REALISE THE LIZARDS ARE THE REAL MASTERS.

Man the crackpot denialist invasion of slashdot is getting tiring. What happened to the website that actually shouted down cranky god damn denialists, creationists and other conspiratorial loons.

Comment Re:Logic is not part of the M.O. of law (Score 1) 59

Having worked in courts many years this is the biggest load of horseshit. Judges are some of the most fearlessly intelligent people you'll meet. The problem is the laws they have to apply tend to be arse, and they are oft required to rule on fields they have no expertise on. Making a shitty judgement in that situation isn't a sign of unintelligence, it's just the hand that's been dealt.

Comment Re:But is it false? (Score 1) 268

The person that starts the lawsuit can basically pick any country he likes out of at least these jurisdictions and more:

Yep, thats more or less an outcome of Guttnick vs Dow Jones(2002) in Australia where a judge found that if a user reads a page in australia that defames him thats hosted in the US , the place of publication is pretty much the users desktop.

In defamation law if a newspaper defames you, you can sue
1) The author of the article
2) The editor of the article
3) The newspaper
4) The publisher
5) The news-agent who sold you the newspaper
6) And probably his dog too.

So the entire chain of custody of the information from the author to your eyeballs is sueable. Combined with the guttnick ruling (And remember judges internationally tend to read each others rulings and incorporate them when it comes to issues of juristiction, you can pretty much sue the crap out of everyone.

Sucks to be a journalist.

Comment Re:But is it false? (Score 4, Interesting) 268

Defamation means that the information is false.

No, it refers to speech that unfairly harms the reputation of someone. Truth is a *defence*, but its not the same thing.

In most countries a statement being true is usually enough for the complaint not to stick but often a truth being used in a deceptive way can also qualify as defamation. Conversely often "Genuinely held belief" can be a defence for it (although often couple with an injunction to fix the error)

Heres an example. Lets say Barack Obama has Asthma. I dont know if he does, but lets just pretend for the sake of this example. Lets also say that he really doesn't listen to his doctor and instead of using a preventitive he instead huffs on a ventolin puffer all day. Its something doctors consider poor asthma management and even counterproductive.

Now heres a defamatory statement: Barack Obama abuses drugs. Assuming the "puffs ventolin all day" fact is true, then this statement is true.

But its also defamatory, because a "reasonable person" (the usual standard in law) would deduce from the he's smoking blunts and blowing lines of coke. In other words I've unfairly hurt his reputation and created a false representation by telling the truth. And in Britain, and many other countries that would be defamation. But in the US? Judge probably won't even hear the case.

Comment Re:HUH? (Score 1, Insightful) 215

Are you asserting that natural climate variation caused by factors other than human CO2 emissions never had an effect on animals or plants?

No. I said we haven't observed those effects on Emporer penguins before.

Natural climate variations other than human CO2 are a pretty small signal in the scheme of things. The cause of Climate change is overwhelmingly human caused. Why is this still a debate amongst the non scientitific community?

Comment Re:HUH? (Score 0) 215

If you apply for a grant to study penguin breeding grounds . . . affected by global climate change . . . you can have all the money you want.

Holy shit no. Its well known amongst physicists and other earth sciences that even mentioning climate change can get you in trouble if you get religious types or conservatives on your review panel. Serious dude, climate science is harmful to your career due to all the political interference with funding and the pressures on atmospheric researchers from funding bodies to downplay long term negative consequences of innaction.

Comment Re:HUH? (Score 5, Interesting) 215

OK, and this is part of climate change how? They have done it for years, but now it's part of "climate change"?

Right. We do the anti-science thing in slashdot these days dont we. *sigh*

Penguin observations are something I'm fairly closely involved with professionally. That climate change affects penguins isn't controversial amongst researchers, its something we've known for a long time and studies on it go back to the 50s at least. Basically , penguins don't use magic to navigate, but rather fairly detailed memory of environmental conditions and landmarks. "Hey this is where the water turns cold with the shore to my right. I better start swimming south where there are more tasty fish" kind of thing. The problem is, these forms of navigation are super succeptible to environmental change, and whilst climate effects of CO2 are only starting to become widely felt, the effects on the ocean so far have been huge, particularly near the poles Again , none of this is controversial, we know this to be true.

Now I'm not much of an expert on Emperor penguins (The project I'm working with does obersvations of fairy penguins whos range isn't as far south as the emporers who are strictly ice dudes) but my understanding is they have never been observed to change nesting location so the question is *why*. Well Antarctic is interesting in that it doesn't change an awful lot, theres not a LOT of variables at play here , but one BIG change is that warmer currents coming in caused by climate change (Some marine biologists joke that climate change should be could 'sea change' because it tends to dispropirtionately affect oceans, and a 'sea change' might be your career path if you do climate science and the fundamentalist right regains power and starts defunding evolutionary biologists and climate physics again).

So its a guess that its the cause, but its a good guess because it seems the most likely candidate, all things considered.

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